Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Sitting at the very front of our farm, built by our friend Jobbo - @thebuilderrecycles - made entirely from timber and tin found around our property, it is exactly what we had hoped for.

I can't tell you how much it pleases me to know that the apples we've been picking are going straight into the shopping bags of our lovely customers. There are no trucks, no cold-stores, no middle-men, no retail markups - just fruit and vegetables and flowers grown here, picked by us, certified organic and DELICIOUS!!!!!

I feel so very grateful for the support we have been shown so far. I love that Miss Pepper's BPOD (best part of day) each day is collecting the money from the tin. And I feel like this little farm stall is something we have spoken of and wondered about for so many years and now she's here - and isn't she gorgeous!!

If you are local, if you are passing by or if you've been dreaming of a day-trip to our lovely area - please pop by. We are Daylesford Organics - 19 Foxs Lane Musvale.

(That's not our postal address though.)

But speaking of postal addresses Reannon and Nell please email me yours so I can make and send you your cupcake motifs, yay!!

And to everyone else - I hope you find kindness and generosity when you share your dreams with the world.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

It's a new book celebrating the crochet motif in the most gorgeous way. Hooked! by Michelle, Cecile and Sylvie Delprat is filled to the brim with all kinds of sweet motifs, there are hearts and flowers and cupcakes and mushrooms and apples and birds and skulls and so many more. Seriously, I want to make them all. And my girls want me to make them all for them too. They've already started designing brooches, decorations for their school books and patches to sew on their jeans.

I think it's a really great book; the styling, the patterns, the photos and the ideas are all beautiful.

But where to start??

Miss Indi has been begging me to make her some love heart bunting for her bedroom for ages, so I pulled out the cottons and started hooking.

And then just because they were too cute not to, I made an apple, a mushroom and a strawberry. I really want to make the cupcake next too.

If you are into cute and quirky and crochet, then this book is for you.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Although it's only just begun, my week got off to a pretty shaky start this morning when I lost and then found my car keys in the garden where they'd been hiding overnight and are now soaked through so the clicker won't let me in and the car won't start. Then I couldn't to work out what Indi with braces could eat for her school lunch, couldn't find socks for Pepper and then I turned up to school to find that I'd totally missed the grade six parents' meeting. Oh well, onwards and upwards eh.

So although I'm still feeling a bit rattled by the morning and by the wind, I'm sticking to my appointment with my blog before I head off to my appointment with my beautiful Chinese doctor, the housework can wait.

Why don't we have a little catch up on what's going on around here.

Lately we've been;

Picking/Preserving/Eating/Marketing - APPLES!! Hooray for apple season. So far we've picked our Jersey Macs, Gravensteins, an unknown variety we call Daylesford Delicious and some Blenheim Oranges. All year we imagine the time when we can walk through the farm plucking apples off trees and taking big crunchy bites of them, I can't tell you how great it is to be here, now. I couldn't possibly count the number of apples I ate over the past weekend either, yum!

And this year we've decided that instead of sending all our apples off the farm to shops and markets, we're going to try to sell them from here. Right now, as I type this, our friend Jobbo who built our cubby-house is building us a cute little farm-stall at the front of our property. Hopefully in the weeks and months and years to come people will pop in and buy their apples here. Hopefully we'll be the local apple farm and rather than buying apples that have travelled in trucks and been stored for goodness knows how long, people will choose apples grown bio-dynamically, sun ripened, picked here by our hands, and stored no longer than a few days at most.

If it works well we might even sell other fruit and veg we've grown here too.

Watching/admiring/photographing/writing - about wooden spoons. These salad servers were made from both sides of a branch off a pine tree. We've been using them in our kitchen for the past few days but I still love this photo with one finished and one cut but not yet sanded.

I am so inspired and enamoured with my farmer boy's passion and his design and his direction, using the spoons in our kitchen is the icing on the cake.

Reading - a book about grief has been tricky because I have found myself totally immersed in it and finding myself grieving along with Joan for things past and imagined. I'm loving this book but finding it emotionally exhausting, terrifying and intriguing all at the same time. I think this is one of those books that will hang around and haunt me for the rest of my life.

Missing - my school girls.

Winding and knitting - a pair of socks in the most gorgeous golden sunshine colour. These will most likely be the slowest pair of socks I will ever knit - in purl with all these twisty cables - but they are a challenge and I love them already.

Feeling grateful - every single time I step outside.

I need to go now and walk down the hill to my parents' house where my girls have been making yogurt with their grandparents, auntie and cousins. I need to remember to change my shoes because clogs are no good for gravel or hills. We're having beans and cous-cous for dinner. I hope Indi can eat it too. Hopefully I'll get a chance to walk around the big block tonight. And then maybe I'll do a bit of the cute crochet project I've been making for a book review blog later this week. Phew!

So how about you, what are you reading, growing, loving, writing about, obsessing over right now?

Thursday, February 5, 2015

It's possibly a bit silly to write up a recipe for something so straight forward as dried apple rings, but this afternoon as I was making up a batch they looked so pretty that I couldn't resist snapping a few photos and then I thought - why not.

So here we go - this is how we make dried apple rings at our place.

Gather -

a basket of apples

half a lemon

water

a knife

an apple peeler/corer thing - if you don't have one never-mind, you can do it the old fashioned way with a peeler and a knife.

a colander

a dehydrator

air tight storage jars

Gather your apples. Just like there are different potatoes for different meals, there probably is a an apple variety that is more suited for dehydrating, but our Jersey Macs were first off the trees this week so we used them.

Peel, core and cut your apples into rings. Actually, only peel if you feel like it.

Add one tablespoon of lemon juice to four cups of water and mix well.

Dunk all the apple rings in the lemon mix and leave to soak for a few minutes.

In theory the lemon is supposed to stop the apples from browning, but we just do it because we like the taste.

Drain the apples in a colander, give the colander a shake and then lay the rings on a clean tea-towel to dry.

I usually press another tea-towel over the top to get all the excess water off.

Then load your apple rings onto the dehydrator trays making sure there is space between them for the air to circulate.

After a couple of hours in the dehydrator, test the apples to see how they're going. Ours generally take between four and six hours.

When your apples are leathery or crunchy, just the way you like them, take the trays out and leave them at room temperature for ten minutes or so.

Then load them into a glass air-tight container and store them out of direct sunlight.